Explaining Nick Knowles, Britain's Handy Crumpet

So there you were, reading the BBC high-earners list the other week, thinking "there are too many men on this list," or maybe thinking, "there are too many white people on this list." But you didn't properly think, did you? You never stopped to properly think. Because if you had, if you'd stopped for one fucking second, you'd probably have thought: "Hold on, Nick Knowles?"

Well, now's your chance. Everyone, deep breath and… "Hold on, Nick Knowles?"

Good, now we're getting somewhere.

Hold on, Nick Knowles?

First, a brief evocation of my past: it's 2007. I'm sitting in the Vue Cinema in Cribbs Causeway, Bristol, with two friends. We are waiting for the film Juno to start. The theatre is gradually succumbing to the pre-film mutter, voices are lowered as Admiral insurance ads give way to trailers for Run Fatboy, Run. There's a good energy. A nice, gentle, "let's watch a mumblecore movie about teenage pregnancy" sort of vibe. Then the three of us notice a late-comer filing in through the side. He's tall, at least 6'2; he's wearing Timberlands, bootcut jeans and one of those collarless leather jacket. He's trying to move quickly, he's got an arm around someone and he's ushering them into the nearest seats they can find. He settles for two on the front row of the main section of seating, the two seats in front of us. We look at the back of his head. His tousled hair is familiar. He smells of sawdust. We all peer round, as subtly as we can. We try and bend our faces around the chipped wardrobe of his jaw to get a proper look at who he is. We gasp, we can't believe it. My friend George, who has no internal volume control is the first to say it, and it cuts through the softly humming cinema like a a dropped-plate in a canteen.

"Hold on, Nick Knowles?"

Nick Knowles grunts. Stands up, and goes and sits somewhere else.

For those who don't know who Nick Knowles is, an explainer: Nicholas Simon Augustine Knowles was born in Middlesex and started his professional life as a labourer. At some point in the 1980s, he decided to move into television, working first as a runner and then working his way up to presenting an ITV programme called Ridge Riders , in which celebrities such as Midge Ure were given the chance to take classic motorbikes on off-the-beaten-track routes around the UK. Since then, his on-screen career has been utterly defined by a home-building show called DIY SOS. He has also hosted gameshows Guesstimation, Perfection and Break the Safe. He apparently collects top hats. In 2007 he was named "Britain's Home Idol" by the Halifax, narrowly beating Sarah Beeny to the prized title. Now, in the year 2017, Nick Knowles ranks among the highest earners at the BBC, drawing in something between £300-349,000 a year.

Hold on, Nick Knowles?

We can probably best describe Nick Knowles aesthetic as Surf Dad, or possibly Halfords Dilf. His scalp secretes its own VO5 Extreme Style Rework Putty. Every morning he produces a brand new bead necklace from glands on his throat. His skin is made of ox hide and his stubble could sand the scales off a pangolin. When he talks it sounds like a crocodile belching.

To put it another way, he doesn't look like a television personality. He's no Graham Norton or Gary Lineker, hell he's not even a Martin Roberts. Yet this look, this vibe – "man with paint on his hands buying four pints with a £50 note" – is exactly where his success lies. It speaks to the type of man he is, or at least, the man he has become in the imagination of the British public. A bloke who could tear the decking from your garden with his bare hands and then do a piece to camera. He is a presenter who gets the job done, a man who deals with the matter in hand. Nick Knowles, with his voice like Tom Waits bleeding a radiator, is the UK's common-sense superstar.

My mum thinks Nick Knowles is "tasty". Some other words my mum – and your mum, and all mums during their yearly summit at the Bicester Village Shopping Outlet – use to describe Nick Knowles include: scrummy, gorgeous and fab. To help us contextualise Nick Knowles, and further understand his appeal, let's briefly consider some of the other men my mum has, during her life, referred to as "tasty":

Greying; looks like he runs a dry-cleaning business; tired sparkly eyes like an old cat.

UK Steve Irwin; temperament probably best described as Christian Summer Camp Leader; doesn't fear death.

Smiling Sun God; head like an old peach; skin as thick as a car-tyre.

Fuckable Des Lynham; retired bad-boy who's just moved to Majorca vibe; probably winks a thousand times a day.

[No picture of Andy available.]

Andy looked a bit like Andre Agassi; had huge blistered hands; devastating with skirting boards.

I'm pretty sure that if you combine the power of Schofield, Backshall, Dolenz, Essex and Andy our old handyman – sparkly businessman, Christian wildman, winking leather-head, Majorca bad-boy and skilled worker – you reach an apex. You end up with precisely the right amount of charm; not too much that it becomes flashy, not too little that he's boring. You end up with a bloke who feels at once normal, hands-on, rough around the edges, and charming. You end up with Nick Knowles.

Hold on, Nick Knowles?

The reason we're all here really – and certainly the reason Nick Knowles is here – is DIY SOS. If you haven't seen it, then stop going out so much and get yourself to iPlayer. It's basically a home improvement programme, well at least it was at the start. To begin with, the premise was that Nick Knowles and his team of handymen and women would arrive at the site of a renovation gone wrong. Let's say, for example, that Carl from Trowbridge had tried to redecorate his son's bedroom and in the process had pulled the boiler from the wall. Clad in purple polo shirts, emblazoned with the SOS coat of arms, the crew would set about fixing it. It was Changing Rooms, with an underdog angle. Not only that but the team were irresistible. The banter came as thick and fast as polyfilla, and was just as good at plugging those awkward gaps!

Then in 2010 the programme changed. Instead of being called DIY SOS, it took on a new extended title, The Big Build. In its new guise the objective switched to helping renovate the properties of deserving families. Typically this involves ambitious extensions or conversions that offer a higher standard of living for the residents. They make improvements to the bedroom of a girl born with quadriplegic cerebral palsy; they repair the flood-damaged home of a former-firefighter who has just lost his wife to leukemia; Prince William and Prince Harry help the team build housing for veterans in Cheltenham. The community gets involved, all the plumbers cry and Snow Patrol receive another royalty cheque.

On top of that, it's on a 9PM. This is prime Radio Times real estate, taken up by a property show. At its peak, The Big Build has seen viewing figures approaching 10-million, numbers Linda Barker could only dream of. And why not? Since this change, Nick Knowles has single-handedly done more for social housing than the current government have managed in seven years.

Yet in the same stroke – in making DIY SOS a feel-good community project – it's all gone a bit Postcode Lottery. What was once a programme about dodgy gazebos has become a hyper-emotional exercise in moral justice. A British answer to Extreme Makeover Home Edition, tailor made for a country over-reliant on the idea of a "deserving poor". In doing so, it has turned Nick Knowles from a TV handyman into a benevolent guardian angel. We might ask, who gave Nick Knowles and the DIY SOS team the authority to decide who among the needy is deserving? But of course this isn't a question we ask, because the nation trusts Nick Knowles. Nick Knowles knows the measure of man's soul. Nick Knowles is a spirit level.

Whether Nick Knowles himself actually is the moralising beefcake he has become in the British imagination, is besides the point. The Great British Public have chosen him. He now exists in the space Noel Edmonds, used to occupy: the light entertainment morality vessel.

That's what we do with our television personalities, that's what makes him the common-sense superstar, and it's why he's paid so much by the BBC. We can't just value celebrities for their showbiz appeal, we have to turn them into moral arbiters. They can only be good if they make us feel good, or better still, if they judge us to be good in return. It's the same logic that has turned Ed Sheeran into the biggest pop star in the world, and the culture that has long celebrated James Corden's transformation from 'prick' into 'prick who pretends to cry at Adele'. We don't want flashy, we want sturdy, honest and God-fearing.

Nick Knowles is the Brexit-voting woman's handy crumpet. He is the DIY daddy Lorraine Kelly can't stop dreaming about. He is paid £300,000-349,000 a year to fix guttering and and help sick kids, and in doing so scratch a deep, spiritual itch within our nation's volksgeist. He is good with a drill and he raised a fucking shitload for Children in Need. He is the Fat Face fleeced everyman who just wants to spread a little joy.

Still though. Nick Knowles?

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